A General View on Applications & Advantages of XML in E-Commerce

Aren't XML, SGML, and HTML all the same thing?

SGML is the `mother tongue', used for describing thousands of different document types in many fields of human activity, from transcriptions of ancient Irish manuscripts to the technical documentation for stealth bombers, and from patients' clinical records to musical notation.

HTML is just one of these document types, the one most frequently used in the Web. It defines a simple, fixed type of document with markup designed for a common class of office or technical report, with headings, paragraphs, lists, illustrations, etc, and some provision for hypertext and multimedia.